Great animation and a cool story too, good vs. evil...

A distillation of the long series also available as a download on this site, Bloodspell is one of the longer Mechas here, being in this version a fully fledged feature, able to stand in its own right. Set in a land where the spilling of their own blood creates magic to those gifted which such powers, and originating from the United Kingdom, the film has a English accented cast throughout and works very well on its own account, needing no prior knowledge of the source episodes to enjoy it. It also features one of the more interesting heros of the Mecha genre, the bald headed Jered who, with the one armed Scouser Ged (at first his nemesis), becomes something of an endearing character as matters proceed. Jered is more than an muscle bound action cipher common to the fantasy genre, and it is to the maker's credit that some emotionality is suggested below the 2 or 3 expressions the Mecha process grants their hero's regularly impassive face. Its necessarily clunky visual notwithstanding, Bloodspell succeeds throughout in being cinematic in conception, with excellent editing, pacing and some memorable, if somewhat idiocyncratic, dialogue added to a real sense of place. Recommended.

I enjoyed the Bloodspell, the 14-part machinima series; it had a good script and was fueled by excellent acting, sound and smart directing, but there were some problems here and there. A slow and cumbersome first episode gave the series and awkward start, plus there were pacing problems here and there. Now that the series had been condensed into a full-length film all of the problems have been and addressed and the film not only looks better (color correction has really deepened the look), but the new opening monologue (by the excellent actor, Paul Hamilton, who plays the master) is much, much better. In fact, I prefer the film version even though I liked the series a lot. Additional re-working of sound by the excellent sound designer Phil Rice, is an improvement over an already great sound design. The story seems to work better being told continuously. Somehow there is more empathy generated for the main characters.

This is some of our best machinima filmmaking. Congratulations to Hugh Hancock and the Strange Company for intelligent and creative improvements on what was already a very good series.